Dogs, Saints and Columbus Day

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/06/opinion/columbus-day-statues.html

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Columbus Day weekend! An excellent time to celebrate the history of our nation and have another fight about statues.

Also, I have to tell you about Balto the hero sled dog.

But first, Christopher Columbus. There are at least 100 statues of Columbus across the country, and some of them have been having a tough time. Protesters who see him as nothing but a disaster for indigenous Americans have been splattering them with red paint and hitting them with sledgehammers from Yonkers to San Jose.

There was an anti-Columbus demonstration recently in Columbus, Ohio. Not quite sure how they’re going to work this out in Columbus, Ohio.

Central Park in New York has two Columbus statues, one a 76-foot-tall whopper at, um, Columbus Circle. The park is a sort of mass market for historical markers — 29 statues, along with multitudinous plaques, busts, carved panels and memorial groves. Most of them are accompanied by critics. A park official once told me the only noncontroversial statue on the premises was Balto, the hero sled dog.

Balto was famous for bringing critical diphtheria serum to the then almost unreachable town of Nome, Alaska, in the winter in 1925. He was a real celebrity in his time. But I am sorry to tell you that he actually has had detractors.

“It was almost more than I could bear when the ‘newspaper dog’ Balto received a statue for his ‘glorious achievements,’” sniped sled driver Leonhard Seppala, whose team ran the longest stretch of the 674-mile Serum Run. Seppala felt very strongly that his lead dog, Togo, was the true hero of the day.

On your behalf I have been looking into this controversy, and I would say it’s possible Togo’s cheerleaders had a point. However, on the plus side, Balto never invaded anybody else’s country.

Which brings us back to Christopher Columbus, who has actually been on a slide for a long time. “He was a big deal in 1892 when they were celebrating the 400th anniversary,” said Peter Cooper Mancall, a professor of history and anthropology at the University of Southern California. “But when we got to 1992, Columbus did very poorly.” People had started to point out that the Vikings had already discovered America, and that it was no secret in Europe that the world was round. And his arrival was nothing but bad news for the natives who had gotten there first.

Critics also note that Columbus never actually set foot on the place we now call America. This is true, although he definitely deserves a day if we want to celebrate the first European to reach the Bahamas.

Columbus supporters, like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, say he’s a symbol of Italian-American pride. That doesn’t really work since there are so many actual Italian-Americans we can celebrate. What about Mother Cabrini? Mother Cabrini was a great humanitarian who established orphanages and schools for the poor all around the world. And she lived on this continent.

Our current statue obsession began, naturally, with Donald Trump, who claimed that if people start to remove monuments to Robert E. Lee, the next thing you know, they’ll be eliminating George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, since they were both slave owners.

This is obviously nuts. Robert E. Lee was perhaps a nice man and a good general. But his point was winning a war that would have divided the United States for the purpose of preserving slavery.

You judge historical figures by their main point, because if you demanded perfection on the details you’d have nobody left but the actual saints. (Who include, I would like to emphasize, Mother Cabrini.) The point of George Washington’s career was American independence. Thomas Jefferson’s was the Declaration of Independence. I say that even though I have never been a huge fan of Jefferson, who was possibly the worst male chauvinist in Founding Fatherdom.

The point of Christopher Columbus was exploration. Although people knew the world was round, they had no idea how long it might take to get around it. Columbus’s goal was to try to make it to the other side of the planet. He sailed out into the great unknown and brought back word of his discoveries.

This was not good news for the folks who were already there. Columbus described them in very positive terms, the way you might tell your friends about a really big bargain at the shoe store: “No one refuses the asker anything that he possesses, on the contrary, they themselves invite us to ask for it.” You already see the readers licking their chops and ordering up an expedition.

I’d say leave Columbus alone, but one statue per city is plenty. And Thomas Jefferson can stay, too. If we tore down all the statues of men who had terrible attitudes toward women, we would not have anything in Central Park but Alice in Wonderland and a dancing goat.

And of course, Balto. The plaque under his statue says it’s “dedicated to the indomitable spirit of the sled dogs.” Hard to argue with that. Plus, he was neutered.